Google Asks Publishers to Optimize Content for Google Assistant

Google announced Google Home in the year 2016. Google home is a speaker that contains the Google assistant. Google assistant allows two-way conversations with people and seeks to help the users in completing tasks in the real world. According to Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai - this was like building their ‘own individual Google’ for every user and the technology has gained popularity in recent years as people (teens and adults) enjoy the utility of voice search’s ability to provide quick answers and directions.

Though there are problems with Google’s voice search like there’s no way to track it, measure its impact on conversions or understanding the way it impacts the traffic but still in today’s time, voice search is raging like never.

Recently, Google has sent notices to publishers giving directions on making their content more visible and discoverable by Google assistant. These notifications have been sent via Search console and now can be sent via email also.

Notifications have also been sent to those who have invested in AMP or structured data markup like US podcast, recipe and news publishers. The Google assistant actions are developed explicitly for these content types and users can tell the assistant to return the matter from such publishers.

Google has automated all the directory pages through various actions associated with gathering content from a particular site; which makes this kind of content more visible. These commands are the ones that can be used within Google assistant from your website.

Technically, the content will already be optimised for Google assistant with structured data and markup. So there is not much that the site owner needs to do after this. And if the owner wants to customise his actions directory, he needs to do one more thing.

Notifications on Google’s search console urge the owner of the website to claim his actions directory page. He can claim the directory page which will allow the site owner to edit it or unpublish it if he doesn’t want Google Assistant to find his content. Additionally, a publisher will be able to edit his name, description and logo according to his preferences after claiming a directory page. For a directory page that goes unclaimed, the automated version will still be there, and the actions therein can still be employed with Google Assistant.